Artful Land Care

Confession, Repentance, and Commitment to End Racism?

The folk of the African American Methodist (AME) community are dedicating this Sunday “Confession, Repentance, and Commitment to End Racism.” Others (congregations, pastors, and Sunday morning preachers/speakers), are being asked to speak up, write up, and liturgy up alongside.

If 1960’s civil rights and power movements prove anything it is a country cannot legislate racism away. While housing, schools, health, and jobs are better for some, much is not and for many there is little discernable change. Though legislation can put a dent in systemic racism, real change comes about by putting an end to traits racism has embedded in the way people think, live, and act. The end of racism comes with the embodying of anti-oppression values—values which are yet to become normal in US schools, churches, businesses, and politics. This systemic reality is what makes the AME call so hard. Being raised in the US means all US people embody the roots of racism: white, black, brown, young, middle-aged, old. Moving toward an identity of anti-oppression and working to end racism is to know I am the hurt, I am the problem, and I am the solution.

This Sunday’s call is Wisdom shouting at the gates of the city; it is a call to all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, heritage, or sexual orientation. It is a call to know I, you, we, the people, have one aspect or another of racism embedded in our being and it is tearing at our health, our wellbeing, and our relationship. For the hope of a day when our children’s children will know health, wellbeing, and good relationship we are called to confess racism.

There has been a fair amount of talking on the Doctrine of Discovery (DoD) in this space. If the DoD speaks anything, it speaks to the subjugation of landscapes. The base of this subjugation is the extraction of landscapes resources. These resources are the landscapes soul, water, minerals, timber, wind, soil, and people. US Chattel slavery of 1830, farmworker slavery of 2015, Oak Flat copper, Ferguson, Canadian Tar Sands, coal removal, and Surinam mining are historical and current instances of US people, all US people, benefiting from one aspect or another of racism. The people are called to know the benefits they accrue from racist copper, natural gas, coal, gold, and food, and to repent.

Sunday is more than a call to recognize the racist reality folk live and benefit from, it is more than a time of regret and sorrowfulness, it is a call to change. Moving beyond confession and repentance is about engaging, acting where we can, and supporting the actions of our neighbor. This is about community, where work in Idle No More, #BlackLivesMatter, LGBTQ rights, environmental rights, ending CAFO’s, Farmworker rights, are not singular but interconnected. Such commitment is learning the intersectionality of oppression is not the hurt of humanity but the destruction of Creation. To know this destruction is recognize racism is currently embedded in the minds of our children. Change comes not from our commitment singularly but from our commitment generationally. A meaningful Sunday is a call to action that carries beyond our community and ourselves. The change needed to end racism means we not only confess and repent, but we speak clearly to our children and tell them they have a responsibility to follow us and carry this work onward, and they in turn have an obligation to tell their children they also have the responsibility to carry it as well.

The end of racism is more than legislation, a liturgy, a sermon, or a special Sunday service. If that is all it is, we have done no more than engage in one more piece of symbolism. A commitment to end racism is a call for bold liturgy, a prophetic word, and engaged generational action.